Shortly after the Moss Landing fire, we published a report analyzing the immediate impact of the disaster. Now, almost three months later, CAISO’s battery landscape has been altered, specifically the ancillary service pricing in NP15. It should not be too surprising to anyone that a fire of the magnitude of Moss Landing, combined with the simple fact that there is S to N congestion during the midday block of hours, that the reserve capacity markets would awaken and continue to be strong as we move into Q2-2025.

Figure 1 | Moss Landing Outages by Resource (MW)

Our first figure shows the storied history of the Moss Landing battery plant, separated out into the units operated by Vistra (orange) and PG&E’s Elkhorn facility (blue). Battery energy storage operations at Moss Landing began at the end of 2020. It took less than a year to encounter a major safety incident, when in September 2021 a leak and resulting high battery temperatures forced Vistra to shut down operations to undergo maintenance.